Consumer

Business

Search form

The Friday Arts Diary

Art

Tate Modern, London SE1 - Tino Sehgal, 24 July – 28 October

Tino Sehgal undertakes the annual commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall as part of The Unilever Series. Sehgal’s radical, audience-orientated work explores the experience of live encounters between people, eschewing physical production. By creating social situations, Sehgal looks to address the visitor directly. For the 36 year old British-born German artist, the immaterial and intangible is everything.

Music

Barbican Hall, London EC2 - Wynton Marsalis, 25 - 26 July

American trumpeter and arch-conservative jazz purist Wynton Marsalis takes his historically informed music to London with the UK premiere of Swing Symphony – a symphonic exploration of the evolution of swing. Marsalis is joined by his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle.

Comedy

Old Royal Naval College, London SE10 – Dylan Moran, 20 July

Greenwich Comedy Festival, set in the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College, closes with Irish comic Dylan Moran’s brand of sharp observational comedy. Moran navigates religion, relationships and life’s absurdities and delivers it with signature shambolic charm. Support comes from comedian and performance poet Tim Key.

Dance

Tate Modern, London SE1 - Ei Arakawa, 22-29 July

The Tate Modern’s new space devoted to live art, The Tanks, hosts a week-long residency from the Japanese artist Ei Arakawa. Arakawa uses elements of dance, sculpture and sound in his work. The residency includes a workshop examining this cross-disciplinary work as well as the history of ballet in 1920s Japan, while a “single’s night” invites singles to dance with paintings by Jutta Koether.

Theatre

National Theatre, London SE1 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 24 July – 27 October

Simon Stephens adapts Mark Haddon’s award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for the stage. 15-year-old autistic Christopher tracks down the killer of his neighbour’s dog, setting out on a journey that changes his world. Stephens’s production features Matthew Barker, Niamh Cusack and Luke Treadaway.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.